1:58pm
Laura Barton in the Guardian asks How popular is crack? and quotes Colin Stewart of the "Relate drugs service":
"The market has changed a lot now," says Sutton's colleague Colin Stewart. "You have a lot of teenagers aged 14-20 dealing, who don't use it but who sell it to fund their lifestyle. The worrying thing is that the crack that's around at the moment isn't very pure. It was 80% and now it's 50%. People end up in massive debt - £500 a day is common and kids will do anything for a £10 rock."
Very worrying, indeed, if they're selling low grade crack for high grade prices. Someone should report them to Trading Standards.
(BTW, I thought Relate was the old Marriage Guidance Council, so I'm not sure what its drugs service is all about. Do they recommend which one to take? Do they source it? That would be useful.)
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11:57am
Leo McKinstry has an excellent column in today's Express on the Northern Rock fiasco:
Brown has long portrayed himself as a financial genius but the mess of Northern Rock exposes him as a hollow fraud. The Prime Minister has not only presided over the first run on a British bank since 1866 but he has also put public funds at risk on a colossal scale.
The only reason the Brown administration has been so obsessed with Northern Rock is that it is based in the Labour heartland of the north-east, where Labour holds 28 of the 30 Parliamentary seats.
With a general election looming last autumn, Brown was terrified of the political consequences of seeing Northern Rock collapse, with the possible loss of around 5,000 jobs. So he dithered, indulging a kind of fiscal McCawberism, hoping that “something will turn up”.
It hasn’t. Now each of those jobs is costing £10million in Treasury loans and guarantees. Rather than propping up Northern Rock, it would have been far better to let the company find its own private sector solution. If the bank could not, then there was no point in setting up a life support system funded by the taxpayer.
Leo has kindly alerted me to some information which, as far as I can see, has yet to have been reported. Back in 1
998 and 1999, Gordon Brown was engaged in a long, public and bitter battle against Ken Livingstone, the then Mayoral candidate for London, over the question of issuing bonds to raise funds to improve the London Underground.
Livingstone was hugely enamoured of the idea and seemed almost evangelical in his attempt to sell it to the public and to force Mr Brown to approve it. The then Chancellor argued that the issue of bonds would, on the contrary, saddle Londoners with huge debts and was something to be ruled out ab initio.
Here's how he put it when he gave evidence to the Treasury Select Committee on 14th December 1999, in response to a question from Brian Sedgmore:
One proposal is that the Mayor should issue bonds, that he should issue bonds to the tune of billions of pounds......It would be a huge cost for London, it would be a huge additional cost for families. You would have to question whether the London authority could bear the burden of this. Under the present rules it could not. It could put the whole financial basis of the London Authority at risk. I think the more the information comes out about what the proposal involves in its present form—the freezing of fares, the bond issue and the Mayor's credibility—the more you can see that it is actually a costly exercise that is misleading people about what it could achieve. As I say, it could be higher than £3 billion; it could be a lot more than that, but it is a very expensive proposition for every citizen of London.
It's a rather different story today. As PM, Mr Brown wants to issue bonds of far greater value than anything envisaged by Mr Livingstone. Explain this: why did he think in 1998 and 1999 that £3 billion bonds would be a disaster, but in 2008 bonds worth eight times more are a wonderful deal for the country?
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8:39am
Wow. What a night. To say we beat Arsenal is to understate it - we dismantled them, and put to to rest the idea that Arsene's kids are anything special. The great joy of this Spurs team is that event our 'veterans' are young - Robbie Keane is only 27. Our 'kids' are in a different class.
As for Jermaine Jenas; if he played like that every match he would be seen as the best midfielder in the Premiership. He was simply awesome - and how fit he must be under the new regime, running at full pace after 90 minutes across the pitch to make the fifth goal.
Spurs are on their way to Wembley. Bring on Chelsea!
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8:33am
In a typically terrific column, Alice Miles points out the fundamental flaw in Ed Balls' latest wheeze:
But what will they chop up all the vegetables with? In the week that the Home Secretary admitted the Government is considering installing metal detectors in schools to catch kids carrying knives, the announcement of compulsory cooking classes has a certain La-La land quality about it.
It's corruscating stuff:
Well, while...[my daughter]... was gripped by...[Night Garden], I had been listening to the Northern Rock statement - and it suddenly struck me that Alistair Darling really didn't make a lot more sense than the Pinky Ponk. Something has happened to make this Government utterly surreal, its claim to be in control of anything pure fantasy. Look at us in the media: we can barely even be bothered to finish off a Cabinet minister such as Peter Hain any more. Because it wouldn't make any difference to anything. The Work and Pensions Secretary resigns? Uh-oh. Chancellor nationalises a bank? Oopsy-daisy.
And so it was that I turned on the television yesterday to see the Prime Minister's special farewell to Konnie Huq, the children's television presenter. Yes, the Prime Minister. In between his world tour and not appearing in the House of Commons while his Chancellor announced the effective nationalisation of a bank, Gordon Brown made a little film to commemorate the retirement of a Blue Peter presenter.
The Prime Minister appeared after Basil Brush, who is a stuffed fox, and a couple of comedians. “Thanks for everything you've done,” Mr Brown said to Ms Huq, with that strange television smile of his. “You've done brilliantly. Thank you.”
Tombliboo, you see. La-La land. Night-night.
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11:03am
This looks like an unmissable book:
George Bush planned the September 11 attacks. The MMR injection triggers autism in children. The ancient Greeks stole their ideas from Africa. "Creation science" disproves evolution. Homeopathy can defeat the Aids virus.
Do any of these theories sound familiar? Has someone bored you rigid at a dinner party by unveiling one of these "secrets"? If so, it is hardly surprising. In recent years, thousands of bizarre conjectures have been endorsed by leading publishers, taught in universities, plugged in newspapers, quoted by politicians and circulated in cyberspace.
This is counterknowledge: misinformation packaged to look like fact. We are facing a pandemic of credulous thinking. Ideas that once flourished only on the fringes are now taken seriously by educated people in the West, and are wreaking havoc in the developing world.
We live in an age in which the techniques for evaluating the truth of claims about science and history are more reliable than ever before. One of the legacies of the Enlightenment is a methodology based on painstaking measurement of the material world.
That legacy is now threatened. And one of the reasons for this, paradoxically, is that science has given us almost unlimited access to fake information.
Anything which exposes the quackery of homeopathy is off to a good start.
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10:47am
Oliver Kamm has an excellent piece at Comment is Free about Jonathan Steele's new book on Iraq. As Oliver writes:
Jonathan Steele's account of the defeat of western intervention in Iraq must have seemed a good idea in conception. Steele now has to make the best of the circumstance that, while his book was in press, events undermined him. Barring a fleeting reference to the multinational force's success in suppressing al-Qaida, his article this week might have been written a year ago for all its acknowledgement of Iraq's recent history.
I supported the Iraq war and would do so again. It was - to invoke Talleyrand's terminology - neither a crime nor a blunder to overthrow a gangster regime that was in breach of the UN security council resolutions (among many others) that marked the conditions for ceasefire in the first Gulf war in 1991. But it was nearly a failure. Culpable negligence by the Bush administration left post-Saddam Iraq without a functioning state. The combined forces of Baathism and jihadism (grotesquely lauded by some columnists on this newspaper as the "resistance") opportunistically filled that vacuum, with unmitigated barbarism and an appalling civilian death toll.
Don't bother reading the comments. I did, and although there is some sensible discussion, much of it is the usual Guardian stuff:
More drivel from this Zionist ghoul, trying to tell us that murdering millions of people was worth it. These people never learn, history will just keep repeating itself.
What a sick and bloodthirsty (other peoples of course) tribute to death and war on the false pretext of democracy and freedom.
etc.
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9:24am
From today's Guardian:
A City investment banker who held senior positions at Bank of America and Credit Suisse may face jail after posing as a university undergraduate in order to help a student cheat his way through his final-year economics exams.
Jerome Drean, 34, the former head of European equity derivatives trading at Credit Suisse, pretended to be Elnar Askerov, a 22-year-old Azerbaijani economics student at the University of York. Although there was no physical resemblance, Drean is believed to have sat eight exams over a period of 18 months, using a false identity card to pose as Askerov.
Poor chap, I got away with it; no one seemed to notice when
this man sat my finals for me.
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6:43pm
This, from Intermezzo, is very funny:
This what you get when you buy your DVDs for $4 on 14th Street instead of $32.98 at the Met Opera Shop:
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11:12am
REVISED POST: I've thought about this post, and I have changed it to explain better what I mean. Originally some people read it to mean I was accusing Stephan Shakespeare of antisemitism - weirdly, given I stated explicitly that I was not. I was accusing him, rather, of being remarkably stupid, because his language in attacking Daniel Finkelstein involved some absolute classic antimsemitic caricatures - unintentionally, I'm sure - directed against a prominent Jewish columnist.
So here's the revised post:
Daniel Finkelstein rightly, albeit with great restraint, describes this post by Stephan Shakespeare as "remarkably undignified". As Daniel puts it, he:
calls me a "rat", a "former jobber for the left", a "careerist" (uh?) and a "chameleon". Among other things.
Mr Shakespeare has managed to combine some of the most common antisemitic insults - a rat, a left wing infiltrator and a shape shifter - in one post. About a prominent Jew.
As anyone even remotely educated in twentieth century history would surely know, Goebbels' film Der ewige Jude showed Jews as rats. As the film put it:
[R]ats … have followed men like parasites from the very beginning … They are cunning, cowardly and fierce, and usually appear in large packs. In the animal world they represent the element of subterranean destruction.
Rats, it went on,
occupied a positionnot dissimilar to the place that Jews have among men.
Still, it's pretty clear from the argument of his post that Mr Shakespeare is perhaps not quite up there with this century's most towering intellects, so we can reasonably assume that he wasn't aware of the connotations of his insults.
As Daniel points out:
Hilariously, in a sentence about intellectual dishonesty he hasn't correctly represented my argument. What I actually said was this:
Always an automatic crowd-pleaser in the past, it [tax cuts] isn't working quite as reliably as it used to. John Howard, for instance, lost in Australia despite his promises.
This is simply a fact. But it is one that many don't wish to acknowledge. Why? Because they are absolutely, but incorrectly, convinced that making an upfront tax cut promises (that is specific promises to cut the overall tax burden by a set amount) is a run away winner.
Any fact that gets in the way of this argument is denied. It is frequently, and ridiculously, asserted, for instance, that William Hague and Michael Howard didn't really campaign to cut taxes.
Here though is the kicker - one of the reasons why the upfront tax cuts promise wouldn't work electorally is that that making such a promise would be wrong. In other words you can't simply separate electoral and principled considerations.
Conservatives have gone to the country twice promising to net off tax cuts in the first budget against extremely shaky savings proposals. This did not amount to a proper strategy for lowering tax. And I doubt very much the ability of an opposition party to create a robust budget while out of power.
This, incidentally, was a major reason why Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe did not make such a promise.
I usually think it's wise to judge people by the company they keep. And that says it all.
UPDATE: I'm told that Stephan Shakespeare is on the board of Conservative Friends of Israel, and hasn't a trace of antisemitism in him (although I was clear that I assumed he wasn't aware of the connotations of his insults).
Good. Although that makes his words even more stupid a choice.
FURTHER UPDATE: Tim Montgomerie appears unable to read English, so it's no surprise that his comments on the 'Finkelstein-Shakespeare' row are so off beam. Mr Montogemerie is, he writes:
disgusted by Stephen Pollard's rush to Danny's defence by throwing about accusations of anti-Semitism. A nought to 100mph rush to slur someone like that is contemptible.
My words above are clear. I pointed out that Shakespeare's post contains a variety of the most classic antisemitic insults (not just 'rat'). It does. In black and white. There's simply no denying that.
I did not say that he is an antisemite. Indeed, I pointed out that in my view he is probably too dense to have realised what he was doing.
Given that he is apparently a strong supporter of Israel, it simply makes him appear to be even more dense.
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8:49am
The Sunday Telegraph reported yesterday, under the headline, Urbanites can't tell a lark from a sparrow, that:
With its rolling hills, unspoilt woodlands and beautiful coastline, the British countryside attracts visitors from across the globe.
But an estimated two million people who live here have never seen it, according to a new study that reveals the depth of the divide between rural and urban areas.
The research also exposes a lack of basic knowledge about the countryside, with people unable to recognise the most fundamental features of rural life.
Countryside campaigners blamed poor public transport and road congestion for the "shocking" findings.
What's 'shocking' about it? Who cares what the difference is between a lark and a sparrow? I'm tempted to write that the countryside is merely a place for those who can't hack it in cities, but that would probably annoy some people. So I'll restrict myself to pointing out that the countryside is simply somewhere to build when we need more land.
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